By Maricel Rivera

Like providing high-grade fuel and heavy-duty machinery to a race car, businesses can make use of faster time to market and better customer relations with the help of an efficient collaboration software that their employees can easily operate.

Finding the one. In industries where design, development, marketing, distribution, support and solutions are primary business functions, the prevalence and usefulness of collaboration software is undeniable.

There is a notable amount of collaboration software that’s currently available on the market to choose from. That number is divided into proprietary or free, open source, and specialty or high-end software. All of these are competing for their own share of the market by promoting their respective functionality and features. When you are managing multiple teams all engaged in sub-tasks leading to completing the same ultimate project, choosing the best collaboration software significantly helps in streamlining the process of getting your project to the finish line, putting you right ahead of the market.

But in a world where your competitors have all adapted much of the same technologies in order not to get left behind, what really sets one collaboration software apart?

Bad collaboration software. 

  • High-maintenance. This is software that can be much too complicated, takes too much time to install, maintain and update, and may have a longer learning curve before employees can actually get to doing their actual tasks.
  •  Disruptive in a counter-productive way. Instead of allowing the employees to focus on the main business tasks needed for the organization to run, more time will be used up in the software assimilation, programming and training process.
  •  Expensive. The pricing and promotion doesn’t matter – whether high-end, open source or proprietary, software that’s longer to adapt and navigate, and needs more time to be assimilated before being successfully implemented still ends up costing the company more.
  • Time-consuming. This type of software increases time to market and may need additional maintenance and support costs for the software itself. With the length of time it takes to install and train employees to operate, it debilitates a company’s performance in the long run.

Good collaboration software

  • Adapts to changing business processes. Changes and adjustments can be made on the fly. Project managers can easily view and edit tasks per team. If a task cannot be completed on time, the software automatically sends reminders to the involved parties and subsequently readjusts the time line and task hierarchy to adapt to the ongoing changes.
  • Easy to use. By making use of the familiarity of existing and well-known tools that employees know how to navigate easily, such as Outlook, the time it takes for actually using the software is decreased. Changes, commands and task creation will be easier to execute if instead of employing code, the software can be easily managed, like via a visual drag-and-drop interface.

To sum it up, a good collaboration software puts emphasis into ease of use, adjusting to the needs of the business, and not the other way around.

Getting ahead of the competition comes in many different forms. On the software side, it will be about the time it takes for the software to be functional within a company. The adaptability of the program, the ease with which employees can catch on with the interface, and therefore, the efficiency at which it can optimize time to market sets good collaboration software apart from the bad.

The easier it is understood and the faster it is utilized, the quicker will the results of the project be reaped.

Maricel Rivera writes content for Comindware, an adaptive BPM and project management software provider. Comindware Project, the company’s new addition to its family of business applications is an easy-to-use project management software that helps with project planning and execution.